Month: June 2016

Birdbaths are popular with all birds, even birds that otherwise wouldn’t visit a bird feeder, making them a great addition to your back yard. Watching a small flock of American Goldfinches lining up around the rim to drink or an American Robin taking a bath is a joyful experience. Because birdbaths are located outside, one common way to fill them is to use a garden hose. But is your hose actually providing healthy clean water for the birds? You may be surprised to find that it is not!

This spring we’ve had a small but very tenacious group of Common Grackles in the yard. They were first dominating the Squirrel Buster Plus feeders, full of sunflower hearts, driving away the smaller birds. Grackles need to eat too of course, but with grackles, the first day you’ll have one. The next day there will be two. Succeeding days will bring three then five then seven . . . So a change was in order.

Suet is incredibly popular in the spring. In my yard it is arguably more popular this time of year than any of the seed in the feeders. Even if you are someone who doesn’t feed birds in warmer weather, I do encourage you to at least put out suet in the spring and early summer, as you will be rewarded with mom and dad birds visiting repeatedly to bring suet back to their babies and then bringing their fledglings to the suet directly. (And of course woodpeckers and quite a few other birds enjoy suet year round as long as it is the melt-free type that is less likely to go bad in hot weather.)